Michelangelo Red Antonioni Blue: Eight Reflections on Cinema

Introduction

Where does violet end and lilac begin?

—Kandinsky, Concerning the Spiritual in Art

In one of Antonioni’s films that I discuss in these pages, two characters meet by chance outside a theater after watching the same film. They talk about one another, about the chance of their encounter, but of the film they have not a word to say. A film can enter us and reside there, turning and changing through our biography and our fortune. To evoke a film, speak of it, try to write its long and ghostly presence: and especially an Antonioni film, one of the eight major works in color that he produced starting in 1964, after it became hopelessly apparent that color was his world: to face the growing fact of a film, honest as to its structure, its repetitions, its allusions and elusions, its tones, the way something suddenly becomes obvious that was invisible before, to address a film not only as subject material but as form, is my challenge here. That a story does not mean everything, indeed sometimes means nothing. That a revelation can be charged through the turn of a face from shadow into light, colored shadow into colored light. Colors, after all, are more than facts, more than indications. Color has resonance, descends into a past, causes us to remember and fall. To find—not the theme, not the statement, but—the song of the films, what they intimate and how they intimate it, not their formula but their personality.

There are, indeed, things that cannot be put into words, wrote Wittgenstein (Tractatus 6.522). So, these eight meditations might have been a string of silences. It is always difficult to use language for coming to terms with a cinematic image, especially Antonioni’s images, brilliant, provocative, fugitive. Stanley Cavell said the problem beautifully of another book: Its difficulty lies as much in the obscurity of its promptings as in its particular surfacings of expression (162). The Antonionian surface is complicated by delicacy, pain, rhythm, distance, time, urgency, body, the perils of sound. Cavell also suggests that in color films, the world created is neither a world just past nor a world of make-believe. It is a world of an immediate future (82). Antonioni always has his eye on the future: What is this? That is, what is this becoming?

Things to remember:

1.    What people—that is, characters—say in film is not the same as what we see.

2.    There is no proper treatise for elucidating or unlocking the puzzles Antonioni has left us. The puzzle, the mystery, is a quintessentially serious form.

3.    What James Agee wrote of Charles Chaplin’s Monsieur Verdoux: Disregard virtually everything you may have read about the film. It is of interest, but chiefly as a definitive measure of the difference between the thing a man of genius puts before the world and the things the world is equipped to see in it (253).

Also three caveats:

First, I do not deal with the very lengthy Chung Kuo—Cina (1972), or the rather brief Il provino (1965); Ritorno a Lisca Bianca (1984); Roma (1989); Kumbha Mela (1989); Noto, Mandorli, Vulcano, Stromboli, Carnevale (1993); Sicilia (1997); or Lo sguardo di Michelangelo (2004). This book is about the major color narratives, only.

Next, there is no attempt here to work out or exercise a color theory, nor should there reasonably be, since color as Antonioni uses it is not a rigid language nor a set of tools but part of the sense of the world at any moment. For children, wrote Benjamin, picture books are paradise; and children learn in the memory of their first intuition. Also, For adults, the yearning for paradise is the yearning of yearnings (Notes 264, 265).

What we know as a vocabulary of color is only a shallow abstraction suffered through the bureaucratic press of social organization in the modern world, but with color we always see more than we know how to say. Color, say Morgan Russell and Stanton Macdonald-Wright, is just as capable as music of providing us with the highest ecstasies and delights (Levin 129; qtd. in Gage, Culture 241). As to the technology of his color—among the fans of which was Alfred Hitchcock (Robertson, Letter to Ascarelli)—we would do well to remember that no matter who shoots a film and how, it is the producer who arranges for the printing (Pomerance, Notes on Some Limits). Antonioni had the luck to find producers who trusted his poetry.

Lastly, stories and story analysis absorb the attention of the vast majority of scholars and writers who take up cinema. But films are events in themselves, not packages for stories. There are only happenings in film, and happenings are everywhere. A purple coat, a pink cottage. Here, I often jump around, neglect narrative continuities. The reader is encouraged to find a happy way of balancing all this.

Viewing is balancing, at any rate.

In Cahiers du cinéma of May 1980, we find a little note from Antonioni to Roland Barthes, including this (in my translation): "Thank you for Camera Lucida, which is at once luminous and very beautiful. It astonishes me that in chapter three you describe yourself as being ‘a subject torn between two languages, one expressive and the other critical’ … But what is an artist if not also a subject torn between two languages, one language that expresses and another that does not? Immediately after this, the maestro added, I was in the middle of writing this letter when news came to me by telephone that Roland Barthes had died."

On the morning of July 31, 2007 when I learned that Antonioni had died—he had been debilitated for some long while—I was stunned, because that night I had dreamed of him. And I thought how wonderful it was that we still had his films. The more I watch them now, the more I feel affected by the language that does not express.

Beyond the Clouds

We all know that memory offers no guarantees.

—Antonioni

The origins of modernity are obscure, notwithstanding scholarly attempts to fix as key dates the Industrial Revolution, around 1750; the institution of railroad time and invention of the daguerreotype around 1839; the demonstration of vitreous construction and the new visible interior at the Crystal Palace in 1850; or the demonstration at the Eiffel Tower in 1895 of the efficacy of iron replacing wood in construction—a nonrenewable resource [replacing] a renewable one (Billington 29). Looking backward through history, it is less taxing to determine certain harbingers that prefigured the conditions we now call modern, such as the trial, in 1560, of the man called Martin Guerre. Having come to the Pyrenean village of Artigat four years previously, he gave himself out as a person who had run away from the place years before, soon after his marriage in fact; and then returned to live with the wife he had taken and the son she had borne him until it came to seem, for various reasons, that he was, perhaps, an imposter. He was subjected to judicial authority in Rieux, some thirteen miles away, this in front of a jury of strangers before whom his accusers needed to produce a claim entirely unattached to the folk and communal knowledge of neighbors whose understanding of the man had grown in the deeply committed, agriculturally based matrix of everyday life: a claim which, by contrast, stood upon the sorts of facts one needed no history to grasp nor any particular familiarity to clearly discern. The man, whose name was found to be Pansette, was found guilty, condemned, and burned at the stake, an early victim, historically speaking, to the faux pas and misconstructions that are always present in impression management (see Natalie Zeman Davis). To present oneself to strangers is a rigorous task, demanding the most constant vigilance not of what one senses oneself to be and hopes to become but of what one is projecting to the surveillers who form one’s social surround. And modernity, indeed, can be seen to develop in late Feudalism as a form in which strangers proliferate, mingle, interact, and structure a world where private knowledge, traditionalism, family history, and intimacy play a relatively marginal part. Modernity also opens gender, a favorite subject of Michelangelo Antonioni, to new perspectives and understandings, being, as Susan Sontag has said, the only culture that makes possible the emancipation of women (Time 114).

Beyond the Clouds is, in a way, an extended essay on the symptoms and possibilities of modern life, certainly insofar as modernity both cultures and bounds people’s ability to become intimate and engaged with, or sensitive and attuned to, the increasingly distant others who move past and around them in an incessant flux. A boy and girl cannot quite get together; crime does not sit comfortably in the seat of habitual behavior and friendship; a man and woman cannot quite speak the same language; religious passion hovers uncertainly in the precincts of an ancient city, whose stones reverberate with a sense of the deep past. It is superficial to say that this film is about love.

Antonioni’s project was to cull some of the substantial material he had written over several years (and ultimately published in That Bowling Alley on the Tiber) and fashion it for the screen as a quartet of episodes, each running a little under half an hour and each following the story of characters occupying different social settings. The first gives the story of a young fellow who meets a girl in Ferrara, but then loses her, and then finds her again. The second, set in Portofino, puts a film director into the presence of a girl who draws him out of his meditations with a chilling story of having committed a killing. The third begins with a marriage in trouble in Paris, and continues with a strange and perhaps fortuitous meeting over a problem with real estate. The last, in Aix-en-Provence, has a young man meet a young woman who should love him, and who perhaps does, except that she has plans he cannot interrupt. In these episodes, we see the interwoven and dominant presence of movement counterpoised against tranquility; strangeness challenging the desire for contact; urbanity in the face of traditionalism; etiquette interplaying with urgency; communication either broken or made painfully ambiguous; seasonless merchandising; and the deeply horrifying possibility that our unitary relations have been slowly, methodically exploded over time so that it is only as fragments and with fragmentation of spirit that we may be condemned to lead our lives.

For aficionados of Antonioni and devotées of this particular film, a brief apology, because there are parts of it I studiously avoid addressing here:

Having suffered a massive stroke in 1985, Antonioni was exhausted and partly debilitated when it came time to shoot Beyond the Clouds. The insurers insisted on the presence behind the camera of a healthy and competent director. Out of friendship, Wim Wenders agreed to play this role, and eventually himself directed certain introductory, transitional, and concluding narrative passages or bridges involving John Malkovich in the film-director role of episode two: a scene in an airplane above the clouds; a scene at a windy lonely beach; a scene on a train heading into France; meditative scenes in the streets of Ferrara; scenes at the Hotel Cardinal in Aix-en-Provence; and a hilltop scene involving Marcello Mastroianni conversing with Jeanne Moreau as, painting Mont Sainte-Victoire, he attempts to recapture the inspiration that had seized Cézanne (and also the inspiration of Borges’s Pierre Menard, whose admirable intention was to produce a few pages which would coincide—word for word and line for line—with those of Miguel de Cervantes [66]). I work around these insertions by Wenders—which were photographed by Robby Müller (exquisitely, but not, I think, as Antonioni would have had them photographed) and written with a view to perhaps making more explicit the connections I cannot help but feel Antonioni would wish us to tease out on our own. That Wenders is paying homage to Antonioni is without question—in his diary of the shoot, for March 9, 1995, he writes of a particular shot, He shoots it again and again, with tiny variations, as though to put off the end for as long as possible (138)—nor can there be any doubt that the younger man held the older with the greatest of esteem and bore him a profound love. Yet for all this, he is not and was not Antonioni, and the interludes are distinct in every important way. In a proposed edit, writes Wenders, Antonioni sliced out almost all of the additions. ‘Leave my film alone! My stories don’t need any framing, they can stand by themselves.’ What he wasn’t capable of saying in words, he’s just told me in the form of his edit (181). So I leave them to the reader’s pleasure, just as Cézanne’s mountain is left to the painter who must now find a way to regard it through another man’s eyes.

CARMEN AND SILVANO

Portico

Stone and stones. Receding from the camera, a long straight portico, with matched rows of cement columns topped by white plaster arches and a vaulted ceiling. A cobblestone walkway. Beside this to screen left, a road, bordering the modest green of what looks like a rugby pitch. Dense fog. Comacchio, the little Venice, town of more than a hundred arcades, near Ferrara, city of the House of Este; probably the Portico of Capuccini, in that late part of fall where winter can almost be seen.

We are peering at the single, advancing lamp of a bicycle—a typically Antonionian view, recalling immediately how in his cinema we are given what Gilberto Perez calls partial views of arresting partiality (368); certainly a view that tends to render the uncertainty of modern life with elegant exactness (369). Then, on the road, a car (with two lamps) advances. Gendered vehicles, then, one showing twice the light of the other. The car stops and a young man (Kim Rossi-Stuart) jumps out, excusing himself rather gracefully just as the cyclist, a girl perhaps not quite as young as he (Inès Sastre), stops pedaling and turns to face him in the stillness. He needs directions to a good hotel: expensive or cheap, he trusts her. Just there—she points behind. As he walks back to his car she regards him carefully, then rides on, and with a quick turn he discovers that she is gone.

Tall, thin as a whooping crane, expensively dressed in slate gray, he has long hair stylishly cut. Her long hair was neatly tied, and she had taken care to make up her face primly and cleanly. We will learn that he is an engineer, out here in the country on a job; that she is a teacher, cloistered until school closes, but under these measured, shady columns they were only a boy and a girl, a stranger and someone who knew the territory, someone who drove a car through the fog and someone who kept inside a portico making circles in the air with her feet. One searched only what he needed to know, the other was happy to be margined and marked, to guide herself in the columnar shade of art and civilization.

There is no reason why we should wish or expect these two to meet again, except perhaps the intoxication of their beauty, which suffuses us with a desire they perhaps do not feel. Yet it seems instantly true that when these two are in one another’s presence they are (even lightly) bonded, a single twosome, not two solitudes, and that they work in a sensitive negotiation to produce what has been called a togethering (Ryave and Schenkein 269ff). Watching them as, tentatively, they hold this coupling, it is not difficult to be reminded a little of the conversation in Vertigo between Scottie Ferguson and Madeleine Elster outside his house near Telegraph Hill, the day after he has pulled her out of San Francisco Bay, when, reading her thank-you note he smiles and says, I hope we will, too. She waits a moment. What? He waits half a moment. Meet again sometime. And she says, very matter-of-factly, We have, I think to underline that there is no reason for us to hope they will have another encounter. Only one is a wanderer, Madeleine tells Scottie, Two together are always going somewhere. That strange voice does seem to be echoing from the depths of Carmen (we will see that the subtle invocation of Vertigo is no accident.) Silvano and Carmen are distinctly not going somewhere, yet there lingers the idea that they ought to be, will be, must be—a connection born in a thought.

He turns his car around, at any rate, and drives back the way he came.

Etiquettes

In a strange little scene Silvano checks in at the hotel: a scene that is strange in the way that only Antonioni’s scenes can be strange, seeming to go forward and backward in time and space at once. We are lingering in the forecourt as he enters a hazelnut green atrium and speaks to the innkeeper, a stocky man who gesticulates in a wearied, businesslike way. There are fancy iron bars over the door panes, such that our view is a little obstructed, and outside where we are positioned there is no telltale sign that proclaims this rather squat building a hotel. Room number 4, says the innkeeper, do you have any bags? The boy says they’re outside, then fluidly emerges to get them. The innkeeper gazes through the door but, losing this moment, we suddenly dissolve to the same lobby later on, our young man entering from outside as though from another world. The innkeeper is gone.

Time in Antonioni, Perez notes, is a time of the moment (370). With a real ferocity, one can think to pass by way of a memory into a history long decayed, or, in the magical spasm of déjà vu, think to have spied in a faraway past a secret event that has only just now transpired. Outside, it is quite as bright as when the boy checked in. Have only a few seconds elapsed? Where has Silvano been that he should now be returning as though steeped in the traces of some exploration? And why did we not accompany him? This transition that signals a change of time and attitude conveys a sufficient instigation to believe something is different about the boy, something we cannot see (and that is therefore catching).

He enters the breakfast room, where a man—one of those mushroom-colored souls who always fill the background when we travel to strange places—is devouring something with a glass of water near a window. In a second room, Carmen is seated alone, modestly finishing her meal. She gets up as though instinctually and joins him at the window, says ciao. Something of a Narcissus, he is surprised. The beautiful thing, says he, gloating a little because he finds her attractive and is tickled that she is paying attention to him, is that he came here by chance. When, formally enough, she asks why it’s beautiful—since in her perfect pudeur she does not leap to the conclusion that she could be found attractive—he rattles on about how he was supposed to go somewhere else and at one point let the car drive him, a car that we may like to believe had a personality and will of its own. One can recall Fred Astaire captivated by Cyd Charisse in The Band Wagon, taking her for an evening’s ride in a hackney cab and letting the horse decide where they should go. Fate enters human affairs through the body of a substitute: a horse or else a car so attached to one’s person that one has no consciousness of guiding it. Silvano’s car is a spirit blown by the wind, and so his meeting with Carmen is ordained by the gods.

Silvano makes to nuzzle against Carmen’s tawny neck and, charmed and a little excited, she moves off, her lips and sweater red as berries. Turning her head away from him, she reveals a light smile of satisfaction. They sit down at her table and smile into one another’s eyes. He thinks he has caught her. She knows she has caught him. But Antonioni will show, here and elsewhere in this film, what it means to catch, and how equivocal experience can be.

Meanwhile, what universe do we inhabit with these two adventurers, the modern one? A girl behaves in a courtly fashion, conscious of her own demureness as though it is a garment tailored to her form, while a boy gives the impression, perhaps without affectation, of having come on a quest, while on the highway behind them, that through its echoes and its racing flashes seems to dominate their space, those modern symptoms, movement and mechanism, are indicated forcefully with every speeding cipher. A man in blue punts down a little canal near the road, an emphasizing contradiction, medieval in every effortless stretch of his arms as he plies his pole. And is Silvano not a knight, with his invisible baggage and his air of privilege? The architecture was built in the twentieth century no doubt, but on a Romanesque model. The walls of the breakfast room are chrysalis green. What imago, we have to wonder, is waiting here to be born?

Once again they stroll along that portico beside their road, sunlight streaming through the archways. Their pace is casual but relentless, as though a riddle is to be worked out. He speaks of sunsets (in what one irked reviewer calls a witheringly silly line [Atkinson]). (Young people always want to have something to say.) They look up and see an icon of the Mother and Child appearing to bless them. Carmen talks about voices, suggesting that the voice is a creature, nervous, secretive. It’s strange, he muses, we always want to live in someone’s imagination; I like your eyes, completely empty of everything except sweetness. They kiss one another hungrily, and—oddly, because there is nothing of presence or intimacy that is not already given in the touch of these lips that have so artfully held back from intercourse with one another while still entreating and invoking so much with their hints of discourse—we approach, approach and judiciously examine, approach with hunger to see or know more. Then the scene fades, a conventional love story: that is, a story in which appetites are subject to etiquettes, in which conventions themselves are loved.

The Kiss

That we should approach, lean toward, that kiss! We have seen kisses onscreen before. For decades, they constituted the royal icons of cinema. Plainly enough, this one comes from passion, is erotic for both partners, surprises, and deeply pleasures. It escorts us to a new, or apparently new, depth. Yet, to learn this we need not dolly in. Does the camera movement perhaps provide explanation for—thus cover—our lingering interest in a sight that should normally seduce just a passing glance, for to let the shot run long with a steady camera might embarrassingly reflect a viewer’s attention back upon himself (even in the dark, where it cannot be optical relish for others, the rush of blood to the face is a palpable experience)? But the movement inward (or outward, away from ourselves, into ecstasy) produces in itself an interest and a payoff: not that something might be detected in the kiss with a closer view but as though the smooth gliding form of our fascination is a direct biophysical response to the kiss’s solicitation. We take leave of ourselves to kiss the subject matter of the film just as, smoothly and effortlessly, Silvano draws Carmen toward him in this kiss.

"HOTEL"

Dissolve. We discover our duo walking into the upstairs hallway of the hotel. She is leading him to her door. Centered in the frame is a pair of French doors giving out into the night, presumably over the forecourt, and through them we can see a bright turquoise neon sign, possibly HOTEL—it is visible only as a fragment—eerily agleam. (Only from inside, that is, do we see a sign that this is a hotel!) A shimmering reflection of this colored light is behind the boy’s back, around the doorframe of the room opposite Carmen’s. While she waits, he goes over to the French doors, opens them, steps out into the turquoise night, turning his face momentarily so that it is bathed in the rich undersea color. Then he steps back in, closes the doors behind him, says good night. Before going into her room, she follows him with her eyes, and we can see plainly enough that she is hungry for him. This is no dance of suspension and titillation for holding off the pleasure of a sexual encounter, for winding up the audience, but a careful and ritualized outplaying of fruitful ambiguity and doubt, the commonplace etiquette of modern life, when anticipations need not lead to resolution, when invitations need not lead to happiness.

In his pale green room, with its comforting vaguely Scandinavian lacquered wooden furniture and brown wooden doors, Silvano stands undecided. In her pale green room, Carmen slowly undresses after turning on her television. Having doffed his overcoat, Silvano mops his face with a towel, muses for a moment, quickly turns and opens his door to scan her territory—maybe she has left her door open a little, a hint. Nothing. He closes his door and turns off the light. Carmen is pulling on a prim pink nightgown, oblivious to some drawings made by her very young students taped to the wall behind her next to a small framed landscape and the television. She sits on her bed thinking (presumably of Silvano): What is he doing? When will he come? What will he look like when we are warm together, when his neutral gray skins are slivered off? She is certainly not thinking, Curious, unappetizing man. Antonioni’s skill is to give us what feels like certainty about the most intrinsic and private realities—what they are musing, each of them, alone—while also showing these realities to be unimportant, insubstantial. Silvano is sitting on his bed fully clothed while we hear a car pass by outside. He stretches out, pulls a blanket over himself, shows some anxiety as the scene slowly fades. In the morning, from above, we look down on him still asleep as cars pass one another on the busy road outside and someone sounds a horn. He rises in a trance but while tying his shoes seems suddenly to remember a girl … a girl who spoke of voices and kissed him. He moves out quickly to check for her. She has gone.

He asks the concierge to buy her some flowers. But it’s too late. Carmen and Silvano do not find one another again.

Two or three years go by.

In the modern world, which is the world in which yesterday has no hold upon tomorrow, the constant and enervating circulation that throws strangers against one another without introducing them produces a situation described by Georg Simmel, in which we experience a particular fear or perplexity that comes with seeing people we cannot hear (Visual Interaction). Carmen had told her knight earlier, Voices never become part of you like other sounds. She says you end up not hearing the sea, for instance, but a voice you can’t help listening to. Yet at the same time, these two say very little to one another, afford one another only briefly and superficially the opportunity to hear and know each other’s voice. They seem continually to pass like cars on a road, in a reflex that materially embodies our modern experience of social relationship: we see others without knowing them, relate to them only in a specific and particular way, applying ourselves to only a slice of their capacity and being. These two have no grounding beyond the hotel in which they spent the night, a dazed, neutral experience of the cars speeding by on the road outside, the soothing green walls that presumably relax and comfort them (as they do us) but that have been designed explicitly to soothe strangers who can be presumed to require soothing. No childhood memories in common, no labor, no plan for the future. Their lives are structured and scheduled according to different principles, on different tracks as it were, and once the night has passed there is little possibility—little reason—for them to connect again.

Two questions present themselves:

Why in the middle of the night does the boy not steal into the girl’s room? No one else is around to disturb them, she is directly across the hall, there is no reason to doubt that she has desire but in any event she would extend him every grace and gentility even if she refused. Is he afraid of sex? The nature of the kiss shows he is not. This question becomes increasingly perturbing when we note how slowly and self-pleasingly she slips off her underwear and her stockings, how she moves upon the bed in the silk nightgown, conscious of her body and its sensitivities, and when we reflect that as a schoolteacher devoted to her students (the drawings on the wall) she might not have many opportunities for meeting men, especially young and attractive men such as this one. As to him: without getting directions from her, he would never have found this hotel. Why does he hesitate? Could it be that he is thinking of making love to her, imagining the sensation of her body against his, wandering through the corners of a pleasure that has not yet been his, anticipating it with such concentration that the imagined pleasure, swollen, overwhelms him? Could the etiquette and shyness which is holding him back, coupled with the beauty of the anticipation, not produce a state of affairs in which, for him, the thought of romance is more pregnant than the act?

That is one. Another:

Why should Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo be invoked, as, surely, it is? Scottie Ferguson has followed the salesgirl Judy Barton to her home in the Empire Hotel on Sutter Street, a shabby environment with a turquoise neon sign outside the window. Having cajoled her into allowing him to dress and style her (so that through her he may invoke Madeleine Elster, his former object of fascination and obsession taken too early in death), Scottie is waiting in her hotel room for Judy to return from the hairdresser, and as he stands to look out her window he is bathed in the light of the turquoise sign. It is the same hotel light that bathes Silvano for a moment as, standing outside her room, he contemplates the possibility of love with Carmen. Might it be that there was another woman for Silvano, before, in another life, and that she is dead or vanished; that Carmen has animated pungent memories of her, and that through Carmen the woman is haunting him? Amazed that he has found her, he fears that if he comes to her in the night he will be able to detect how she is different from the other, detect that she is only herself. Or he knows that if he comes to her, the actuality of the love will fail to match the anticipation. More chilling still: if he comes to her, he will learn that she is the other one, reborn. That the dead live. That he is making love to a ghost.

(Antonioni knew and often reflected the work of Hitchcock, who was also charmed by memory in this way.)

The green light may suggest that every love is a haunting, that every man at each moment with a woman is haunted by his memories of other women, by their persistence and reflection; or if not of other women then by his memories of this woman at some moment before, as she was when first he realized her. Every man looks backward, at any rate, while every woman looks to the future, and even though they seem to be staring into one another’s eyes they see at cross purposes.

The green love in the green room, next to the green sign, has chilled him with remorse and fear, with deep need, to such a degree that he must hide from it in a pocket of selfishness. Or else, riddled with memories of loves gone awry, he must patiently make plans, think things over, decide whether he may permit himself to admit the feelings that possess him, as we can see, as we have already seen.

The turquoise light that now bathes—if not his body—the thought of his thoughts: glyphs, parts of a word, something primordial. Frame lines of the French windows slice and interrupt the sign: interruption is modern. This sign is also reminiscent of another turquoise neon sign, in no known language, that illuminates the magical park setting in Blow-Up. In both cases, illumination emanates from, and constitutes, meaning itself: no message is conveyed but conveyance, a meaning that is meaning, the process of metaphor which is bringing (the fire) across the chasm. Not a particular metaphor, but metaphor: the possibility that one thing can be another. The fact that every thing already is what it is not.

After a Film

Two years later in another town. In a public hall a film screening is concluding. The film may be difficult for some viewers to identify, given that we see only the end credits and that these name only actors involved in an Italian dubbing, but Jonathan Rosenbaum gives it as Nikita Mikhalkov’s Urga (1991), a story of cultural and experiential tension between a shepherd and a truck driver. A single smokestack is seen in a long shot, rather similar to what is shown at the end of The Red Desert, where birds learn that the smoke is toxic, and do not fly there anymore. Carmen and a girlfriend are leaving, and so is Silvano, who discovers them in the courtyard, as if by miracle. Nothing, says Carmen a little archly, happens by chance. She is pointing to the force of modernity that guides and guards our lives, notwithstanding our innocent conviction that we are blown by the winds of fate. The two walk off, and find her apartment in a building that strikes him—wrongly, it turns out—as expensive. She makes it plain that a woman needs to hear words, and, in a more mundane light, that a boyfriend has recently broken off with her. For his part, Silvano walks around her simple apartment, gazes out the kitchen window, tries to nuzzle against her neck as he did in Ferrara. Once again, swiftly, she withdraws. Now, of course, it is impossible for him to gauge whether she is teasing or rebuffing and he chooses the conservative path, courteously taking his leave.

We observe him walking down the echoing stone staircase outside her door. He stops and takes a beat: not an actor taking a beat, but a character taking a beat. Maybe I misinterpreted. Slowly he returns. Inside with her, he becomes passionate. They are unclothed. He is running his hands over her skin, yet not in such a way as actually to touch. His fingers explore, but remain a quarter of an inch away. When she jumps forward to take his lips he pulls back a little so that the delice of contact must remain a hope, an imagination. He dresses, walks out, passes through the colonnade downstairs and into the street, looking up and backward as from her window she follows him with her eyes. The tale of Carmen and Silvano is over.

Why—how—does he not touch her? She is ready, she desires him. She is ripe. For one staggering moment she hesitated and held him off, but now it is evident she has made up her mind to forget that past, embrace the present as a road to some blissful, or at least stable, future. Silvano, however, lives in his reflections, nourishing himself with not desire but memory of desire. Also, he is unable to say his need, to make the utterance that constitutes a voice. Or: mute, his voice is only in his hands. How alone we are when we cannot speak across the incalculable void that separates us from alluring strangers, how imprisoned we are by our world when we cannot depict it. Perhaps, however, Silvano’s entire world has taken the shape of Carmen’s hungry body. Her body and his understanding have the same boundaries. In running his hands over her with such precision, such delicacy—Rosenbaum suggests that this scene paradoxically makes one more acutely aware of the warmth of both their bodies than any conventional coupling would—he is engaged exactly in speaking his world to her; and she cannot grasp what he is saying because she does not take herself seriously enough to presume she could be so much for him.

At any rate, time has run out for them. (Their diffident natures and the idealization of their romances prevent them from actually consummating and, thus extending their encounter, wrote The Hollywood Reporter, coolly, as if without remorse [Byrge].)

Yet it is also true that, failing to possess Carmen, Silvano nevertheless inhabits her, and she him. It is remarkable how intimate these two become, between glances, between phrases, in these quiet places, given that they basically do not unite. Perhaps they will not forget one another, but they are on the move, he onward and out of her life, she, at her window, to the destination of all those unknown folk whom we meet through a glance as they shuttle toward something we will never see.

A DIRECTOR IN PORTOFINO

Before

A film director (John Malkovich), who talks to himself rather articulately about a film he is thinking of making, goes to Portofino with a character in mind, and one morning in a little shop by the water, where the choppy green Ligurian sea is slopping onto a quay, and when the shutter has been lifted and the door unlocked, he finds a young woman (Sophie Marceau). She is, we must say, perfect. Her eyes are hazel, her hair long and evanescent; she wears a taupe suit, she looks at him looking at her and shows anticipation, as though his gaze has made her catch her breath. Later, they talk at a pink café spread with green-and-white chairs under lush green trees, and it’s misty. She’s arrived in blue slacks and a beige coat over a fisherman’s sweater, having told an English boyfriend in a yellow slicker to get lost. It’s better that I speak to you plainly. whatever you have in mind, I’d better tell you who I am, says she, announcing a little sententiously